"Boy," Hawthorne said, "you're trying my pa-tience."
The boy looked at him, wiped the tears away with the back of his hand. And then he laughed bitterly. "Yeah," he said. "I've heard that before."
* * *
The boy led him along the base of a row of hills that skirted the southern face of the camp, and then into the woods. They trekked along for about ten minutes, without a word, until they came to the next ridge of low hills, Hawthorne leading his horse by the reins. The boy stopped in front of a cluster of loose brush and branches. He started pulling them away, revealing the entrance to a cave.
"It's just me and my cousin," he said. "And ... and my grandmother."
Hawthorne could see a torch light flickering from inside the cave. He tied the horse's reins to a tree branch and then followed as the boy led the way.
A corrupt stench, like rotting flesh, assailed his nostrils. The cave was dark and bare, the only light coming from the torch farther in.
At the far end, obscured by shadows, a still figure in ragged robes sat on the ground. The figure's head was lowered, covered by a broad-brimmed straw hat. Behind the unmoving form, another person stood, unmistakable even in the dim light as a woman.
It wasn't a torch after all, but a single kerosene lamp on the ground that flicked dim orange tongues around the room. It radiated a heat that made Hawthorne sweat in his gray frock coat. The stench of corruption was worse here, nearly overwhelming.
The woman said something in the Lakota lan-guage, and the boy answered in English, "A white. He means no harm, cousin."
The woman stepped out of the shadows. She was small, about five foot three, with lustrous jet-black hair and dark eyes. Slim and lithe, clad in elk skin painted with green and red, bare-armed and collared. Hawthorne guessed her age at somewhere in her early twenties.
She was a lovely young girl, but Hawthorne was not a man who could be touched by beauty.
She gazed at him, disdain showing on her fine narrow face, and said, "Why have you come?"
Hawthorne said, "Tell me what happened out there."
She flashed the boy a withering look, and the boy dropped his eyes and backed up a step. The girl sighed, shook her head, and said, "There is magic and sorcery in these hills that you could not begin to comprehend. An evil centuries old. The
Iktomi
preyed on the flesh of civilization long before you whites even knew what civilization meant."
The still figure squatting on the floor had not moved or spoke since they'd entered the cave. The girl touched the figure's shoulder, said, "See, White Man, what foulness the Spider Tribe spreads ... look what they have done to my grandmother." She removed the straw hat.
Hawthorne hissed between his teeth and stepped back.
The rotting stench rolled across the cave. The flickering orange light played across a blank, pale mask of flesh, as smooth and featureless as an eggshell.
Where there should have been eyes, where there should have been a nose and mouth and some semblance of human features, there was only a smooth nothingness.
As he watched, a fine fracture appeared where the woman's forehead should have been. The crack expanded, running down the blank face.
And something inside it pushed, expanded, with a weak hiss.
The girl said nothing, only watched him.
The old woman remained motionless, as if already dead, and another crack appeared along the jaw line. A pulpy, blood-smeared yolk leaked out, dripped thickly onto the tattered clothes. The crack broke open, and something moved inside it.
The girl stepped up to the woman, and Hawthorne was surprised to see she had a revolver in her small hand. She put the barrel against the shell of a head and pulled the trigger.
In the shockwave of sound that echoed through the cave, the woman slumped and fell over. Her head cracked open and Hawthorne cursed at the sight of the creature that had almost been born.
A spider.
It slid, huge and wet, out of the place where her brain should have been and then flopped on the ground, writhing in its own fluids, and then lay still.
"That is the work of the
Iktomi
," the girl said.
* * *
The girl's name was Anpao, she told him, and the boy was Enapay. "His name means 'to give a brave appearance'," she said with a faint smile at her cousin.
"Yes," Enapay said. "But that doesn't mean I'm not brave. I am a man, cousin. I am a warrior."
Hawthorne said, "Warriors don't usually run away, boy."
Enapay shrugged.
Earlier, the boy and Hawthorne had removed the old woman's corpse and Anpao cleaned up as well as she could. They had a small store of food and water in the cave, enough to last a couple of days, and the three of them sat and ate by lamp light.
Anpao squatted down next to an oddly long narrow sack, said, "They attacked our camp very early this morning, before light. All nine of them. They had been waiting, I think."
"For what?" Hawthorne asked.
"For there to be no sign of your Army. I believe ... I believe they fear the whites, for some reason. They can sense any threat against them, no matter where it is."
"A rival tribe?"
Anpao and Enapay glanced at each other, and Anpao said, "That would not be quite accurate. They are demons, in the most literal sense you can imagine."
She looked as if she expected him to balk at the idea, but he only nodded.
The lamp light danced, and Anpao looked at the ground. She used a knife to slice off a chunk of dried venison, ate it. When she had swallowed, she said, "The
Iktomi
are ... ancient. Some believe they are the bastard offspring of the Spider Woman, who wove the world out of silk in the dawn of time. The wretched offspring of a brutal rape. But they rise from the earth in times when blood soaks the Black Hills. And now, White Man, there is more blood here than ever before."
"How did they do that to the old woman?"
Anpao gazed at the ground where her elder had been, at the stained spot in the dirt that couldn't come clean. She said, "They ... they simply ... what is your English word? Manifest? They manifest their arachnid phantoms, ghosts seeking incarnation. They ... seed their victims."
Hawthorne frowned. "Seed?"
"With the taint of their fallen grace. The spider ... it symbolizes many things. It is creation, and it is destruction as well. The
Iktomi
—they feed on the fear and hate in man's brain. It makes them real."
Hawthorne didn't question any of what the girl said. He had seen many nightmarish creatures in his wanderings, had destroyed countless manifestations of evil. He was not a skeptic in matters of the supernatural. But one question nagged him. He said, "How do you know all this?"
Enapay spoke up, "Because her great-grandfather was the warrior who defeated the Spider Tribe over a hundred years ago, when the Lakota first came to these hills and fought the Arapahoe to keep them."
Hawthorne said, "So, they can be defeated."
Anpao looked him hard in the eyes. "Yes. Perhaps. But it would take a special human being. And the bow of my great-grandfather." She patted the narrow sack next to her. "The bow must be held by a very ... particular sort of warrior. The kind driven nearly to the point of madness by a hatred of evil."
Hawthorne said, "Hate."
Anpao nodded. "Hate. That was what my ancestor possessed. That is what destroyed the
Iktomi
when he faced them. A hate greater than their own. Rare is the man who can hold that much rage inside himself. Rare is the man whose inner monster eclipses him without ever being unleashed."
Hawthorne's jaw ached. He realized he had been grinding his teeth as he pondered the girl's words.
Then he shook his head, and, smiling thinly, took a deep breath. He said, "It would seem that I'm your man."
Outside the cave, the horse whinnied, its hooves pounding the dirt in panic.
They all tensed, eyes snapping to the cave entrance. None of them moved for a moment. Then another sound—a shuffling of feet on dirt and the rustling of branches.
Enapay reached for his cousin's revolver. He said, "What—"
Anpao didn't take her eyes off the cave entrance. "They've found us," she said. "I had hoped we would have until nightfall, but ... they've found us."
"Stay back," Hawthorne said, drawing his Schofield. Enapay and Anpao didn't argue. He took a step toward the cave mouth. The thing outside moved again, and Hawthorne realized it was a deliberate sound meant to attract them.
Hawthorne grasped the clump of dead branches that rested over the entrance and yanked it back.
A grinning creature with a deathly white face and soulless eyes leered at him on the other side of the brush. Scraggly black hair hung down its back.
Hawthorne swore, jumping away, and Anpao and Enapay scrambled to their feet.
The thing reached through the brush, trying to grab Hawthorne's face. It was naked, rib bones protruding against its unnaturally white skin. Long, thin arms—a good foot longer than they should have been—made the creature look gangly and awkward, like a huge white spider. It clutched Hawthorne's collar and moved its mouth, yammering and howling.
Hawthorne knocked the hand away then shot it in the face.
It had no effect. It was as if the bullet had turned intangible and passed right through the thing.
Its fingers reached for him again, grasping through the brush. It began clambering over and into the cave. A weird emerald light shimmered in each of its fingertips, and then the light began forming shapes—long, narrow shapes, with eight points extending from each one.
Hawthorne shot it again, two, three more times, all to no effect.
Anpao said, "Cousin! Shoot it!"
Enapay did as he was told, but his bullets had no more effect than Hawthorne's had. The creature, with its horrible grin, just crouched there in the cave entrance.
The sinuous green lights began taking more solid shape, the eight points extending, until they were the very embodiment of large green spiders, floating in the air around the thing's outstretched hands.
Enapay fired point-blank at one of them, but the bullet passed through the shimmering body as harmlessly as fingers through a pool of water. His face contorted in terror, Enapay fired again and again as the spiders swam at him.
Hawthorne started to come to the boy's aid, when another of the ectoplasmic things, about the size of his fist, shot at his head. He batted at it, ducking, and his hand passed right through the body. From far away, he heard Anpao crying out, saw from the corner of his eye his two companions under attack.
The closest spider circled Hawthorne's head, and he swung at it again and again, to no effect. The thing loomed before him, hissing, and shot directly at his face.
Then, the shimmering unreal spider became solid and real, and it was in his mouth, pushing hard into his throat.
Gagging, Hawthorne dropped his gun, gripped the spider's body and struggled to pull it out. He stumbled back against the cave wall, fell to the floor, wrestling desperately. He caught a glimpse of Anpao darting with almost superhuman speed out of another spider's path, and then ducking as it came at her again.
But then Anpao and Enapay didn't exist anymore, the pale man at the mouth of the cave didn't matter. There was only this vile thing invading his body, pushing its way into his throat, suffocating him.
For all its previous insubstantiality, the spider was now solid and muscular. It was all Hawthorne could do to keep the thing from pushing farther into his throat, let alone pull it out. He rolled around on the ground, the pulse at his temples throbbing, lungs aching from lack of oxygen.
He felt the spider's legs scrambling on his gums, felt it shift at the very back of his throat, felt his fingers, slick with sweat, slipping. And he felt it move another half inch—not down his throat, but up,
up
, trying to push through his sinus cavity.
It was trying to get to his brain.
That horrible realization gave him renewed strength. He bit down on it, tasted coppery blood. The spider thrashed. He clamped his fingers around it and pulled with every ounce of muscle he had.
The spider slipped out, less than an inch, but it writhed and pushed back in. Hawthorne pulled again, managing to dislodge it by another three inches, feeling the sinewy legs at his tonsils now. And then a form appeared before him, looming.
Anpao. Her eyes wide with horror, blood from a wound on her forehead smearing her face, she braced her feet on either side of him and strained to help pull the monster out.
Blackness began creeping in around the edges of his vision, and he felt his own grip weakening.
And then the spider was out. Air rushed into his lungs and he choked back vomit, struggled to breathe. Anpao slung the hissing creature against the ground, stomped on it, and green bile spattered all over. She fell back, exhausted.
For a long moment, Hawthorne lay on the ground, bellowing air in and out of his lungs, fighting the nausea and dizziness that threatened to overcome him.
When he pulled himself up to his knees, steadying himself on the wall, he saw that Anpao hadn't moved, only sat there staring dumbly. The spiders were gone. The hideous pale man was gone.
Enapay lay motionless on the ground.
Hawthorne scrambled over to him, checked his pulse. It was steady and sure, but one look at Enapay's face told him that regardless of his beating heart the boy was as good as dead.
His facial features were already mostly gone. The eyes and mouth had disappeared, and the nose was nothing but two thin slits in the center of an egg-like façade. Even as Hawthorne watched, the slits began shrinking away to nothing.
Anpao said, "It entered his brain, just as the other two tried to do to us. I saw it. It entered his brain and ... and
seeded
him. I saw it."
Tears streamed down her face, but no emotion other than blank shock showed in her eyes. She stared vacantly and began rocking back and forth. "I saw it," she said again.
Hawthorne stood up and the familiar rage coursed through his blood.