Spider

down on my hands and knees and retrieve it.

At first I didn’t realize what I must do. I often find that it’s not until everyone has gone to bed that I can think properly in this house, there’s too much interference otherwise, too many thought patterns clogging the waves, if you know what I mean—this is not the least of the reasons I spend so much time down at the canal, because if I’m not careful these thought patterns of theirs crowd out my own, and I can’t have that, I can’t have other people’s thoughts in my head, I had quite enough of that in Canada. It’s the same when they’re all awake in the house, even if I am in my room with the door closed, and let me tell you this: dead souls they may be, but the thoughts they think are grotesque, and this is connected to the creatures in the attic, but I’ll get to them later. No, what I realized as soon as I could think clearly—that is, at the dead of night—was that I must confirm the very vivid impression I’d had in the hallway; there was no point in thinking about anything else until that was done.

It was about three in the morning when I realized that if I knew who she was then she must know who I was—and the implications of that were very disquieting, though it was to take me some further days to think them through with any precision.

The following day was damp and cold. After breakfast I left the house as usual, but instead of going to the canal I went into the little park across the street. Now Mrs. Wilkinson’s house stands on the north side of a square that must once have been impressive. Today though those grand houses with their stuccoed facades and Corinthian columns are shabby and decrepit, many have been torn down and those that remain are tenanted only by rats or ghosts or flotsam like me. So I sat on a bench in the park in the middle of this dilapidated square, beneath leafless trees and a slate-gray sky, amid empty bottles and cigarette packets, and tossed bread crumbs to the crows that live here; and with one eye I watched for her to come out.

It was after eleven when she finally emerged in her winter coat, a shopping bag on her arm, and without so much as a glance toward the park she marched off down the street. I gave her a clear five minutes; then back in, across the hall, and up the stairs to the top floor where she, like me, has her room, though she is on the other side of the house from me. I paused at the top of the stairs to listen; nothing but the radio going quietly in the dayroom, where the dead souls listlessly killed time. Then along the corridor to her door—another pause, another moment of listening intently to the house— then turn the doorknob, and—nothing! Locked! She’d locked her door!

A setback, this. I made my way back downstairs, out through the front door and across the street to the park once more, where I resumed my seat on the bench and tried to think the thing through. She locked her door. The only other door in the house that was locked was the one that opened onto the attic stairs (and of course the dispensary). Far from damping my curiosity, this development had quite the opposite effect, it inflamed my urge to know what the woman was hiding: I had to get hold of her keys.

Occupied with these thoughts, and making no progress at all, I absently pulled out of my pocket a slice of dried toast I’d saved from breakfast and began crumbling it in my fingers and scattering the crumbs on the ground around the bench. Soon the crows flapped down, and when the toast was all crumbled I took out my tobacco and rolled myself a thin one. And there I sat, deep in thought, my outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, smoking among the crows.

This business of the thought patterns: it seems to have grown much worse over the last few days. Why should this be so? Full moon, perhaps? But no, the moon is just a clipping of fingernail, like the crescent of candlelight in the outhouse door. The dead souls, perhaps, have become animated, for some obscure reason, and are generating cerebral energy of an uncharacteristically heavy voltage? But I spent an hour in the dayroom after supper and there was no sign of any vitality at all, less than usual, if that’s possible—they sat there in their accustomed chairs like a group of tailor’s dummies, stupefied with medication, faces like suet, trembling hands, in ill-fitting clothes stained with food and drool (God how they do drool!), waiting for El Mustachio to appear with the cocoa. I should talk! I, too, drool, I tremble, I shamble, and as you know at times I become uncoupled; but God help me if I ever turn into one of them, pull the plug, please, if that happens, let me at least pursue the enigma of my childhood while I have the will for it, and if that dries up then string me from the nearest rafter and let me dangle like the Spider I am! Then in comes the little woman with her tray, and this is all the life we’ll see in here tonight, the small dull ghost of a spark struggling to feeble life in the dead eyes of my companions at the prospect of a cup of weak cocoa made from milk powder and treacly with the sugar that produces these rolls of flab on their bellies and under their chins. They all have fat bodies here, you see—fat breasts, fat thighs, fat fingers, fat faces, and dry hair that’s always flaky with particles of dead skin; and when they stir their cocoa, these zombies, the dandruff comes drifting down into the cups like clouds of light snow. I turn away, I turn toward the window then and rub a hand across my own skull, which is shaved to a stubble from ear to temple, and bristled on top with a few thick tufts precisely the same shade of brown as my mother’s. I can scratch that nubbled skull of mine for minutes on end without a single flake of dead skin coming away, for my skin is like leather, stretched taut as it is over the sharp bones of this long, lean, horse’s head of mine: yes, stubbled leather, this is my head; hooknailed spiderlegs, these are my fingers; and my body just a shell with little in it now but the fetid gassy compost of what was once a heart, a soul, a life— so who am I to curl a lip at the zombies, I who have all the brittle resilience of an eggshell, a light bulb, a Ping-Pong ball? No, it isn’t them crowding the air with thought patterns, it’s coming from somewhere else, it’s coming from the attic. Every night I hear them now, I haven’t slept a wink, and all that’s held them off so far and given me relief is the writing I’ve been doing in my journal.

My journal! Can it still be called that? Picture me at the dead of night down on my hands and knees in front of an obsolete gas fire, groping around for a brown paper bag smudged all over with soot. Gingerly it’s withdrawn, and I clamber to my feet and tiptoe with it across the room to my table. I wipe my hands on my trousers and take it out of the bag. That poor exercise book, a few short weeks ago a pristine thing with a shiny green cover—now it curls at the corners, it’s imprinted with the black smudges of my thumbs, it’s something you simply wouldn’t handle unless you had to: it’s a dirty book. Having wiped my fingers and put the paper bag to one side, I open this dirty book and turn the pages to the most recent entry, adding, with every fingering, a little more soot, a little more of the dirt of the house, transferring it from the chimney to the fading whiteness of the pages before me. I read over the last entry, then turn to a clean page, and pausing a moment, my eyes on the window, my pencil between my fingers, to frame the first words of the first sentence that will once more promote the flow of my memories and the construction, alongside, of a reasoned edifice of plausible conjecture, I begin to write.

I begin to write. And as I do a strange thing happens, the pencil starts to move along the faint blue lines of the page almost as though it had a will of its own, almost as though my memories of the events preceding the tragedy at Kitchener Street were contained not within the stubbled leather helmet of this head of mine but in the pencil itself, as though they were tiny particles all packed together in a long thin column of graphite, running across the page while my fingers, like a motor, provide merely the mechanical means of their discharge. When this happens I have the curious sensation not of writing but of being written, and it has come to arouse in me stirrings of terror, faint at first but growing stronger day by day.

Yes, terror. Oh, I am a feeble creature, yes I know it, I know it better than you do, I am so easily thrown into turmoil, so easily frightened and panicked, and it’s getting worse, I haven’t told you this for I’d been hoping that it might not be true, that I might be imagining it, that it might “just be me”—but it’s not. The feeling of being like a light bulb: it is with me all the time now. I felt it during the interminable hour I forced myself to sit in the dayroom. It wasn’t their thought patterns that so badly upset me, the thought patterns are coming from the top of the house; it was just their dead eyes, only their dead eyes, a single glance from a pair of those dead eyes has the potential to shatter me, to shiver my glassy identity into a thousand particles and leave the thin, barely glowing coil of filament within—the residue, the ruin, of what was once a heart, a soul, a life—leave it naked and vulnerable, smelling of gas, to the gale of the world that will surely snuff it to extinction in a second: and this is why, now, I must avoid their eyes, this is why I must skulk about by night, pursue my restless investigation of the opaque past like a creature of the shadows, like a halved thing, a body without a soul, or perhaps a soul without a body—ghoul or ghost it barely matters, what matters is that I nurse this glowing coil so that it can at least see me out, see me to the end of this thing, and this is why I am so prone to terror now, for I am conscious always of the danger of shattering, which in turns makes me crave control, which is why the sensation of being formed, framed, written makes me so desperately