Bad Glass

Mama Cass circled to the far side of her desk and bent low over its open drawers. There was the sound of rummaging—the crinkle of paper and change, the rattle of loose items—and when she came back up, she had a brown-wrapped parcel in her hand. It was a book; I recognized that as soon as she handed it over. A hardback book. I could feel the solid edges beneath the layer of butcher paper, the sheaf of recessed leaves.

“Be careful with it,” she said. “It wasn’t easy to find. My contacts had to scour all of Seattle.”

I tucked the book into my backpack, and we turned to leave. Taylor stepped out of the room ahead of me.

“Dean!” Mama Cass hissed as soon as Taylor disappeared through the door. She rounded her desk and, with a huge dose of melodrama, slipped a pill bottle into my hand. I glanced at the label: Vicodin. “For the pain,” she said with an ingratiating wink. The wink made me feel dirty, slimy. I slipped the bottle into my pocket and quickly followed Taylor out into the restaurant.

“I hate her,” Taylor said as soon as we were alone out on the street. “I really fucking hate her. She’s a game player. It gets her off. My father worked with people like that at the university. They’re the ones who got all of the promotions, on the backs of their lies and their power plays.”

She got quiet right then, and I knew that she was thinking about her father, remembering what had passed between them, what she thought she’d done. Her voice, raised in anger, as he fell through the floor. His rolling eyes and searching hands. And then her mother, doting on that floor-bound body, her hidden heart filled with blame, or love, or both, or neither.

We walked a block in silence. When we reached Monroe Street and turned to head up north, Taylor pulled to a stop. I turned to face her and found her forehead wrinkled in confusion.

“What’s wrong with you, Dean?” she asked.

I shook my head, not understanding the question.

“Why are you trying so hard? With me? What attracts you?”

I stared at her for a moment, still perplexed. “You do, Taylor. You attract me.”

She looked at me skeptically. “No, Dean, that’s not it. That’s not good enough. Not anymore.” A bitter, contemptuous smile surfaced on her lips. “There’s something wrong with you, Dean, something genuinely wrong. I’m sure of it now. You’re not quite right in the head. You’re not quite … sane. Not if you want to be with me.” With this, she turned and resumed walking.

I let her get ahead of me. Then I dug out my new bottle of Vicodin and bolted down a couple of pills.

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. How long ago was that? I wondered, not quite sure. A week ago? Is that right?

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 full of spiders. Moving, swarming, crawling over one another in waves of liquid motion.