The total stands at ten.
I want to take a break.
I have to keep going though. If I lose my nerve now, I might not find it again.
I go back to the start. None of this means anything if I’m not thorough.
Standing in the middle of the mirrors, I close my eyes. With one of the stakes, I reach up and tap on a beam, trying to replicate the rhythm that they make with their claws.
My eyes fly open when I hear something. I see exactly where the sound came from.
It makes perfect sense.
The thing is over near the stairs. I should have guessed. They’re smart enough to know that it was likely I was going to come down that way, so they hid a sentinel near the stairs to grab me when I came down. While I’m trying to puzzle out exactly where the head is, I notice something else.
They’re well camouflaged to match their surroundings, but they can’t bend light. When my flashlight beam lands directly on it, I don’t really see anything. Held at a steep angle, the shadows give it away. I sense a strange parallax when the light hits it at an angle.
I probe it with a stake until I see the eyes and then I stab it.
Blue—the eyes were blue.
That makes eleven. The cellar is clear.
Now that they’re all gone, I can feel the difference. The dread I felt has evaporated along with the slime. I stand for a full minute, looking at the way the sunlight swirls through the dust. It’s beautiful. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, right?
The cellar looks almost too clean.
“Spiders,” I whisper.
That’s the problem—where are the spiders?
Sometimes, I can be pretty dense. I run for the stairs.
(I search my senses.)
I search my senses.
There’s no feeling of dread in here. I’m standing in the barn, looking up at the loft because of the revelation I had in the cellar. The vampires must eat spiders. I didn’t see any spiders in Mr. Engel’s basement, and I didn’t see any in my cellar. These are places that definitely should have spiders. Maine is famous for giant, fat-bodied spiders. At least in my family it always was. Mom would complain about them all the time and Uncle Walt would always defend them.
“They don’t do any harm and they eat tons of mosquitoes,” he would always say.
The barn, in particular, was home to some giant arachnids. I never liked them much, but I left them alone in deference to my uncle.
But now I can’t see a single web. My flashlight doesn’t reveal any at all.
I also can’t find any evidence of the vampires though. There’s no sense of dread and my light isn’t doing any of the parallax shifting that I discovered. The siding of the barn is so inconsistent that the place is full of random shafts of sunlight now. Once the sun came up fully over the horizon, it riddled the barn with ambient light.
I make a thorough search of the first floor and then climb to the loft.
Granted, I can’t reach the highest peaks. I set up the flashlight to point to various spots and then I move away from that light source so I can see everything from different angles. There’s just no way. Even with their camouflage, I would see them if they were here.
At one point, they had to be here. That’s the only way to explain the lack of spiders. Maybe they roosted up here for a bit during the night. Some of them waited here while the others tried to tap me out of the pantry. After that, the bulk of them must have moved to the cellar where there was less light.
I don’t know—it’s a theory.
I comb through the barn several times, trying to find them. It’s like looking for my keys when I’m late for an appointment. I know exactly what they should look like, but there’s no trace of them. I have to force myself to slow down and really see the barn.
I’m sweaty and dusty by the time I’m sitting on the stairs and I admit defeat.
“Maybe that’s all of them,” I say.
It doesn’t feel true. I had this weird sense of dread when I was close to one in the house. It’s like that skin-crawling feel when someone is staring at the back of my head. I’m not getting that feeling out in the barn, but I still can’t help but think that I’m missing something.
The flashlight beam is still strong. Uncle Walt replaced the bulbs in all his flashlights a few years ago. The new bulbs emit a really harsh light compared to the old ones, but they last forever now.
Sweeping the light around aimlessly, I catch one corner of a spiderweb above me. The spider is gone and the web won’t be rebuilt. That’s a shame. I bet the whole barn will be swarming with flies before long. I can only hope that the spiders return quickly.
“Flies,” I whisper.
I stand up slowly.
“Why are there so many flies in the kitchen?” I ask.
All the spiders are gone, sure, but why did I see flies in the kitchen but nowhere else? I’m walking pretty fast towards the shed. I force myself to slow down and take my time. I can’t assume anything. My gut doesn’t give me any warnings, but it would be stupid to trust that alone.
Holding the flashlight away from myself at an angle, I check the shadowy corners of the shed hall as I move towards the kitchen.
I step through the pantry fast—that place still feels like a prison cell to me. I don’t want to be incarcerated again.
For a moment, I don’t see a single fly. I’m about to admit that maybe I was wrong, but then my skin starts to crawl. Something is here.
That’s when I spot the flies. They’re still there, over by the refrigerator. I sidestep a wide arc around the appliance. The flies are concentrated
