Spider Legs (6 page)

CHAPTER 9

Hospital

N
OW, 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 was 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.

A monstrous spider? He would have laughed it off as tabloid fakery, had he not seen that woman's head. There had to be a connection.

Elmo shifted uneasily, then ran to the phone and called the police station and Nathan Smallwood. He left the hospital minutes later, thanks largely to his natural dislike of hospitals, disinfectants, corridors, and laboratories. Now at least he had a pretext.

CHAPTER 10

Call

T
HE PHONE RANG.
Nathan picked it up. “Yes?”

“Dr. Smallwood.” The voice was pleasantly familiar. “This is Officer Sheppard.”

The lady policeman he had met at the meeting. “Hi, what can I do for you?” He pictured her holding the phone handset close to her windblown, sunny face. She might be wearing a cotton twill shirtdress in burnished gold, and she could have on just enough lipstick to show that her mouth was perfect. His image of her was wickedly familiar, but there were no penalties for hidden thoughts.

“I was wondering if you'd like to go for a walk downtown and discuss this sea spider problem?”

“Police business?” As if it could be anything else, in real life.

“No, personal. The whole spider incident is giving me the creeps. I also love smart men with mustaches.” In his fancy she exuded a refreshingly ingenious warmth.

“Sounds good.” Nathan chuckled. It seemed a long, long time since a woman called him on the phone and showed interest. Of course it was his knowledge of sea life she was really interested in, nothing else. Still. . .

Nathan had been born with a harelip, and although it had been surgically corrected, he thought the mustache enhanced his
looks. Before Natalie called, Nathan was spending his Saturday in his cozy motel room by the sea trying to watch the New York Giants on TV as he read the local newspaper. As he spoke on the phone, he put down Newfoundland's weekly newspaper,
The Dispatch,
where there was a small article on mysterious deaths near the coast. The article was surrounded by a fuzzy border and below the printed matter was a drawing of a giant tarantula attacking boats. Natalie said something. Nathan listened as he fished breakfast cereal out of the box and rapidly munched the flakes.

“Where shall we meet?” he asked.

“How about we go for a walk along Main Street by the coast. Do you know where Martha's Fish Store is?”

“Yes. I'll be there.” Nathan shut the football halftime show off on his TV.

“OK; see you at 7:00?”

“Sounds good.” As he hung up, he marveled at this development. People met all the time to discuss business, but Natalie was perhaps the one he had most wanted to see again—and
she
had called
him.
Who said miracles didn't happen?

CHAPTER 11

Research

T
HE
WORDS “CANTERBURY
Crossing” were carved in a decorative wooden sign that hung outside by the street, floodlit from the front and backed by pine trees. Natalie Sheppard was reclining on the sofa in her attractive garden-apartment in the Canterbury complex, holding the telephone with one hand and eating a piece of raw broccoli with the other while she sat and watched
The People's Court
on the TV. A 110-gallon freshwater fish tank stood against a wall of the living room. The tank contained only a single species of fish: the tiger barb. About seventy of these two-inch-long fish swam in schools back and forth, forth and back. With their red-brown bodies fading to silver on the underside and their four distinctive black strips, they formed a moving wall of color, a magic aura of living stripes and fins.

She hung up the phone. Had she just done something foolish? She had met Nathan Smallwood only the one time, but rather liked what she had seen, and she had the impression that the feeling was mutual. His first glance at her—his pupils had dilated in seeming appreciation. Did she fit some physical image he liked? No matter; she found that she liked being liked, for whatever reason. So she had found a pretext to see him again, hoping that she wouldn't strike him as forward. It was probably
an idle fancy that would soon fade, but why not play it out? Her social life here on the island was not exactly rollicking.

Meanwhile, on the horror front, things were hardly dull. A giant deadly spider ripping people apart? A creature with several brains? She definitely needed to know more.

Natalie had heard of pycnogonids, but only vaguely, so she canceled her chess class, slipped on a hip-hugging jacket in green napa leather, left her condo, and went to the local library to find out more. All around the library were trees of varied species, ages, and colors. A sparse stand of autumn-stripped maples and birches pushed their branches to the blue sky. To her left was a grove of scarecrow trees, gnarled and black, with an occasional leaf as an epitaph to warmer days of the summer. Ancient Indian laurels flanked the canted parking lot and lent a note of grace to the old building.

Some men with shovels were digging some of the soil in a nearby field. As Natalie parked her car and walked along the black slate stones to the library's entrance, she noticed the library was having its annual book fair. A local band was playing. An elderly man wearing a gray jacket approached her.

“Would you like to enter a raffle for this homemade quilt?” the man inquired as he pointed to a huge colorful quilt hanging on a wooden frame. “Only costs a dollar to enter.”

“Sure,” Natalie said. She didn't mind supporting the local library. The man handed her a piece of paper which read:

B
ENEFIT:
J
OHN
C. H
ART
M
EMORIAL
L
IBRARY

W
IN A
HANDMADE QUILT

D
RAWING:
N
OVEMBER (WINNER NEED NOT BE PRESENT)

D
ONATION:
$1.00
EACH OR
6
FOR
$5.00

P
AY
AND M
AIL
TO: H
ART
L
IBRARY,
1130 M
AIN
S
TREET

T
WILLINGATE,
N
EWFOUNDLAND

Oh. It wasn't precisely local. Twillingate was a generous two hundred miles to the north by road. But their library needed support too, and the raffle was valid regardless. She'd do it.

“What's the digging all about?” Natalie said to the man.

“Do you remember the story of the German scientist who discovered the fossil tooth of a giant ape—was it at an Eskimo pharmacy where fossils were ground up for traditional medicines?”

“Yes. But that was in 1935.” Since then, scientists had sporadically looked for the remains of prehistoric, giant apes that weighed 2,000 pounds and loomed 11 feet tall. Natalie thought it was a pipe dream, but who could say for sure? She would have said that a sea spider the size of an elephant was a pipe dream too, before today.

“Well, guess what they found in that field by the library?”

“You're kidding?”

“Several jawbones and more than 2,000 teeth were found of the species
Gigantopithecus.
”

“Wow, any chance they'll find an entire skeleton?”

“Several Newfoundland scientists and a paleoanthropologist from Yale are coming. They think that they'll find the remains of
Giganto
in nearby caves used to hide military supplies from German bombers. I've heard that some of them think that
Giganto
lived about three hundred thousand years ago. Ancient humans may have killed them off by hunting them or competing with them for scarce bamboo which the humans used for tools and this ancient ape used for food.”

“Fascinating.” But she found it hard to accept for a new reason: the climate would have had to be a lot warmer here in those days for bamboo to grow. That was possible, of course, but she would have to see more solid evidence before believing it. Natalie looked at her watch. “Got to go.”

The library was fairly crowded as a result of the book fair. Natalie reached for the black and white door and noticed a few wasps hovering nearby. She stooped down to avoid them, entered the library, and approached a librarian who smiled back at her.

“Hi, I'm looking for biology books,” Natalie said. One of the wasps had followed her inside and quickly headed for a window,
which unfortunately was closed. She watched the wasp for a few seconds.

“Anything in particular?”

“Invertebrates. Sea spiders.”

The librarian raised one of her eyebrows, then smiled, and said, “Come this way.”

Natalie gazed out the library's rear windows, past the wasp that continued to dive bomb the thick pane of glass. Outside the window were motor yachts and sailboats bobbing up and down in the water alongside the harbor docks. Most of their sails were furled, their engines quiet. The library was one of her favorite hangouts, with its hardwood floors, antique Persian carpets and cream walls. It was like no library she had ever been in before, and she was happy that a good chunk of the township's taxes went to it. She didn't care if she didn't win that quilt raffle; it was for an excellent cause.

She returned her attention to the pile of books and journals at her table. Her hand moved to a nearby Tiffany lamp with its hand-blown tulip shades, and moved it closer to her reading area. She lost herself in the joy and frustration of spot research, following up several false leads for every true one.

As Nathan Smallwood had indicated at their meeting, pycnogonids lived during the Jurassic Period, about a hundred fifty million years ago. Natalie pictured monstrous sea spiders carrying on and cavorting with a tribe of brontosauruses, now called apatosauruses. No, that wouldn't work; the thunder lizards had turned out to be upland walkers, not water waders, so wouldn't have encountered the sea spiders.

Deep water species of the sea spider could be huge although tropical shallow water species could be as small as an ant. The pycnogonid's digestive and reproductive system had many branches that penetrated deeply into the creature's many legs. Most species had eight legs but some with ten or more legs were not uncommon in Antarctic regions.

The librarian came up from behind her. “I found something
else,” she said to Natalie, and handed her Lockwood's
Biology of the Invertebrates
and a computer printout.

Tap, tap, tap, went the wasp on the glass.

“Thanks.”

The scariest part of the creature was its proboscis, or sucking appendage, which was longer than the rest of the creature's body. The mouth looked like a triangle at the end of the long trunk of the proboscis. Natalie found very few pictures of the adult creature, but she did find several diagrams of the baby larval forms which looked nothing like the adult.

Natalie heard some high-pitched voices and looked up. Some nursery school children were leaving a room with an adult volunteer. They had just finished listening to the children's story
Ants Can't Dance.

“How did you like it, Terrie?” one mother asked.

A beautiful little girl wearing a sweater with a golden phoenix on it replied, “Great. Can ants dance?” The girl shook her blond pony-tail with excitement.

Natalie smiled and thought that maybe someday she would get married and have a little Terrie running around her condo. Someday. She tried to return to her reading. Unfortunately the overhead bright fluorescent lights were just turned on and the white Formica surfaces of her table were a little hard on her

eyes, like looking into an icy arctic lake shimmering under a bright winter sun. The room was getting chillier—perhaps the librarian had reduced the heat because it was near closing time.

Tap. Tap. Tap. She really ought to get a cup and catch that wasp and take it outside.

As she read, some of the gorgeous Chinese bowls and vases that decorated the library shelves were being stored in locked cabinets for the night by a member of the custodial staff. It was almost time for her to go meet Nathan. She gazed down at her book on the table, and tried to wrap up her reading.

In some species of pycnogonid the young larvae invaded the interior of jellyfish where they lived parasitically until they emerged as sea spiders. The larval stages of
Nymphonella tapetis,
a Japanese species, lived parasitically inside the cavity of clams. But these were small spiders; what about the big ones? Surely an elephant-sized creature couldn't live in a clam, not even in larval stage.

Natalie continued to search for information on the larger species in an effort to find some clues to help them in the present predicament. Unfortunately the life cycle of the huge deep-sea species, especially members of the genus
Colossendeis,
were unknown.

This lack of knowledge by scientists was not too surprising. There was still much to learn about the marine life off the coast of Newfoundland. The submerged ice structures, the chemical and geological structure of the ocean floor, the extent and affect of pollution . . . Unfortunately, recent dumping of heavy metals and souvenir hunting had caused some depletion of fish and invertebrates off the Newfoundland coast. So not only was much of the story unknown, it might become impossible for it ever to be known, because of inadvertent extinctions.

The wasp at the window had ceased its relentless tapping on the glass and slowly crawled along the base of the window as if defeated. Its stinger undulated. Natalie was beginning to feel a little like the wasp—nervous and tired.

As she finished her reading, Natalie, like most people, was
amazed to learn of the vast marine zoo that lived beneath the ice in the Arctic. She had thought it would be a virtual desert. But marine life was plentiful. Her books and magazines showed photos of bright red shrimps filled with parasitic isopods, zebra striped amphipods, bulbous anemones with foot-long tentacles, sea fleas, football-shaped ctenophores, sea snails with iridescent shells, tiny isopods resembling daddy long legs with long, fragile forelegs to walk on silty bottoms and paddle-shaped rear legs to propel them through the water. Some of the most interesting species looked more like plants than animals: Violet holothurians—sea cucumbers—thrust out branching tentacles in search of animal prey.

She shook her head, bemused. There was just so much there, but humans knew so little. It seemed that the northernmost continental shelf of Canada covered almost a million square miles, but scientists had seen less than a few of those miles of this vast maritime estate.

As closing time loomed, Natalie had found what she was looking for in the scientific journals. She photocopied five articles, folded them, and stuck them in her purse. Then she fetched a paper cup, went to the window, and used a sheet of paper to catch the wasp in the cup. She carried it out with her, and freed it outside. The wasp hesitated for a moment on the rim of the cup as if considering how to thank her, then flew away. There was her good deed for the day.

Cheered, she walked to the car.