There was no one guarding the Homestead’s entrance. No Mickey with a baseball bat. No figure hiding in the shadows. Taylor was confused.
“They should be here. They were here yesterday.” There was a note of panic rising in her voice.
We stepped into the sketchy business center, and she cocked her head, listening for sounds of life inside the building. I could hear wind rattling paper out on the street, but the building itself was still and silent. After a moment, Taylor barreled forward, making her way down the dim bottom-floor corridor—past the insurance office, the office supply place, the acupuncture clinic—then up the stairs to the second floor. I followed, not wanting to fall behind.
Up on the second floor, Taylor pushed aside the plywood window cover and crawled out onto the plank bridge on the other side. I was about to follow when movement down the length of the corridor caught my eye. A door near the front of the building stood wide open. It was about twenty feet away, and in the gloom I couldn’t see what the room was. Broom closet, bathroom, storage? Its purpose was lost in murky black.
But there was movement there, inside the dark. A churning motion on the floor that set my skin to crawl. Black masses in the dark gray. And it was silent, whatever it was. Absolutely silent.
The plywood cover swung back and forth from Taylor’s passage, and I reached out to hold it steady, still watching the threshold down the length of the corridor. As I watched, part of the black shadow broke away, flowing smoothly out into the corridor. It was a large black spider, moving on multijointed legs. It was as big as a small dog, much bigger than the spiders that had swarmed through the crack in the wall back at the abandoned apartment building.
The room behind the spider continued to crawl with dark motion. It could have been just my eyes and my overactive imagination populating that darkness, but I thought I could see that space
My back shivered in an involuntary spasm, and the spider started to crawl my way. Before it got more than a couple of feet, I slammed the window cover aside and frantically crawled out onto the thin bridge that linked this building to the next. If I waited, if I stood there for one second longer, I was afraid I’d find myself hypnotized by the spider’s smooth, almost mechanical motions—standing there frozen as it drew near, as wave after wave of its brothers and sisters broke away from the darkness, surging out into the corridor to engulf me, to swallow me whole. And the touch of those bristled legs, caressing—light, tremulous touches, gaining muscle and strength— quickly paralyzing me inside a dense spiderweb mesh.
And maybe the touch of a finger in there, too, hidden. And lips and tongue.
As I crossed the bridge, I didn’t even think about the distance to the ground or the way the wood wobbled and bounced beneath my feet. I just kept going, not pausing until I jumped down into the hallway on the other side.
There were no spiders here in the back rooms of Terry’s ballet studio. At least none that I could see. Just Taylor, moving quickly ahead.
I caught up with her at the end of the hallway. She didn’t notice my rattled state. She was too busy looking for Terry.
She called out his name as she stepped onto the wide studio floor, but there was no one there. Terry’s ratty sofa stood vacant near the window, surrounded by a scattered corona of books. She crossed the hardwood floor and circled the sofa—once, and then again—as if it were all a matter of angle, as if she’d be able to find Terry if she could just look at it from the right direction.
I paused in the center of the room and peered into every corner, checking for shadows, checking for spiders. But there were none. No shadows, no spiders.
“He’s gone,” Taylor said, her voice trembling. “I was here yesterday, and now he’s gone. They’re all gone.”
“We just got here, Taylor,” I said. “He could be anywhere. I’m sure he’s fine.” But really, with the spiders, I knew I was lying. I had no idea what had happened here, no idea what had happened to Terry, but I didn’t think we’d find him again. Not really. The spiders were an omen, a harbinger of loss.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s keep looking.”
Taylor nodded and hurried on ahead, retracing the path we’d taken through the building on our previous visit. I kept my eyes on the shadows as we climbed the stairs and crossed to the second bridge. The shadows in the staircase were deep, but they were motionless.
The third building was as quiet as the first and second. Taylor stopped to listen at each new hallway, but there was never even a whisper of sound. I waited as she cocked her head and slowly craned her neck, angling her ears for any hint of humanity in the air, any quarreling voices or laughter, or the tinned sound of a distant boom box. I wanted to keep moving. In those brief intervals of silence, I could feel waves of spiders cresting against the closed doors around us, on all sides, penning us in. But there were only empty rooms. Empty rooms and silence.
I was grateful when we finally reached the roof. I wanted more than anything to see the sky once again. No matter what color it might be.
We found Terry standing at the edge of the roof, near his tent and his makeshift camp. He was staring up at the gray clouds.
“Terry!” Taylor cried as soon as she saw him standing there. She broke into a run. Terry turned at the sound of her voice. His face was blank, unreadable, but he didn’t seem at all surprised to see us there. He opened his arms, and Taylor fell into them.
“I thought you were gone,” Taylor said, her voice choked with emotion, with relief.
“Not yet.”
Terry looked older in the overcast light. The creases on his face looked deeper, and it seemed like there was more gray in his hair. “Did you see it?” he asked, his eyes turning back toward the sky. “The sky was red. Or was that just me?” There was a perplexed awe in his voice. He sounded completely and totally lost.
“We saw it,” Taylor said. “Everyone saw it. It was real.” She stepped back out of Terry’s arms. There was concern on her face as she studied him intently. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said with a gentle smile. “I’m just tired. Just sick and tired.”
“What happened to everyone? What happened to Mickey and the guards and everyone else? This place is deserted. We just walked right in.”
“They’re gone. All gone. They packed up their things and left. Last night was rough. People … people started to see things, in the hallways, in the shadows. They started to hear things, too, voices in the dark. They think this place is haunted.” He shook his head. He didn’t seem angry or sad about his abandonment. Just very, very tired. “I think Mickey took some of them and headed out on his own. But the rest … the rest just wandered away.”
He turned and faced the city, his eyes turning from the sky to study the streets down below.
Taylor gave me a look, and I shrugged the backpack off my shoulder. “Here,” I said as I unearthed Mama Cass’s parcel and handed it to Terry. “Mama Cass wanted you to have this.”
Terry accepted the package without looking at me. He unwrapped the brown paper and let it fall to the roof of the building. Then he glanced at the book’s cover and let out a short laugh. He held it up so we could read the title:
“I’m a fool,” Terry said. He hauled off and threw the book as hard as he could. It sailed out over the street, making it halfway to the intersection of Monroe and Second Avenue before finally hitting the asphalt and breaking in two, pages ripping and flying as the textbook bounced and skidded down the distant street. “What was I thinking? Sustainable farming? There’s nothing sustainable here …
“I’m leaving,” he said. “I’m getting out. It’s too painful now, watching it all fall apart, trying to hold it all together while everyone else’s content to just let it fade away.” He paused for a moment and looked down at the street below. “We’re standing at the edge of a cliff here, in the city, and the ground’s crumbling away beneath our feet. I think it’s time I found something new. Something solid.”
Taylor took the announcement in stride. Maybe this was a good thing: Terry safe, Terry out of danger. “Where will you go?” she asked.
“I have friends in Olympia. I’ll stay with them for a while, until I get things sorted out. Maybe I’ll write a book. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be human, about what we owe one another.”
