Spider - Michael Morley [33]
Spider looks at the small digital picture of her and thinks how, like all the rest, there’s something about her that reminds him of his dead mother. The hair colour is almost identical, and the shape and colour of her eyes too. But that’s where the similarities end. This girl is a whore and a slut; someone almost unworthy of what he has in mind for her. For this will be no ordinary kill. This will be a unique murder, a killing that will make her more famous than any of his previous victims. Spider feels an ache of passion, a lustful gnawing inside him, as he thinks of how she’ll die and what her cool, dead body will be like when he’s finished with her. He strips off his clothes and goes to the en-suite bathroom to use the toilet, wash and clean his teeth. He brushes them three times a day, not twice. It’s something his mom used to make him do. Cleanliness is next to godliness. That was back in the happy days, the days before she left him.
Left without even saying goodbye.
He’d come home from school and had been told that his mom had gone, that she was dead, but he shouldn’t worry or be sad because she was now in a ‘Better Place’, she was in heaven with the angels.
How could that be? How could Mom have gone somewhere so much better, and not taken him with her?
He was only nine years old when it happened. And while he was already smart enough not to trust everyone about everything, he did trust his mom and dad; as they had said, they were the only people in the world you really could rely on, the only people who would always tell you the truth and would always look after you.
Always. For ever and ever.
But it was all a lie, wasn’t it?
For weeks she’d been in hospital and he’d missed her. Missed her every day that he was away from her.
‘I can’t get to sleep, Daddy. When’s she coming home? When will Momma be back?’
They’d taken him to visit her in hospital during all those weeks, and every day she looked sadder, thinner and somehow paler. They said she was fighting what they called cancer and it looked to him like this cancer thing was winning but, oh no, they said, your momma’s a fighter, she’ll be okay, she’ll be fine in the end.
Liars. All of them, goddamn liars.
Even when there were those tubes sticking out all over her, his dad had hugged him and told him that he shouldn’t be frightened, that they were only there to help his momma get well again.
Well again! How he’d longed for that day.
Sometimes he’d climb on to the hard hospital bed because she was too weak to even sit up and put her arms around him. He’d lie down next to her and cry on her pillow. She’d lift her hand, now all bony and thin, with plasters and tubes sticking out of bruised veins, and stroke his face. Her voice was thin and weak, not the one that used to shout down the garden for him to come inside right now and get his dinner, and it was hard to hear her, but the words were always the same: ‘Don’t cry, baby, I’ll be better soon. Wipe away those tears, Momma will be home very soon now.’
And then, all of a sudden, she was gone. Gone to heaven. Gone to the Better Place without him.
Where are you, Momma? I’m waiting. Still waiting.
Given time, Spider might have recovered from the traumatic loss of his mother, but sometimes fate can be cruel, and sometimes that cruelty can have lifelong consequences. Within only weeks of his mother’s death, his father, Spider’s emotional anchor during this critical period of grieving, was knocked down and killed by a police patrol car turning out on a fake 911 call made by local kids who just wanted to see the cruisers zip by with their blues and reds flashing.
Spider’s pine bed is high-sided, like the one he had as a child. Only this one is coffin-shaped. He built it himself, using the tools of his dead father. The bottom of the bed contains a deep, space-saving, slide-out