Day of the Spiders Read online

  Day

  Of The

  Spiders

  By

  Brian O’Gorman

  Text copyright© 2017 Brian O’Gorman. All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people or situations is purely coincidental

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Gemma O’Gorman

  1942-2013

  “How egotistical can you be, to have a camera trained on your face and you’re watching it on the telly?”

  For my long suffering wife Zoe. It ain’t easy, I know, but it will be worth it in the end.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1.

  2.

  The Break of Day

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13

  14

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  The Plague of the Whisperer

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  Epilogue.

  A Quick Word..

  Could you indulge me for just a moment? Please? Thanks. Pull up a chair if you wish.

  So, what’s all this Day of the spiders stuff? Didn’t you write a sequel called Land of the Spiders?

  Yeah, I did. I really did. But you have to understand a little something. I was utterly taken by surprise by the success of Dawn. It did far better than I ever would have predicted, which was why I hastily wrote a sequel. When I say hastily, I mean it. Land was written in just four weeks, and I hate to tell you, it absolutely shows. It was simply a reworking of the same story but in a tower block instead. I had to kill my darling, wipe the slate clean and start all over again. Land was pants, absolute pants. Day is my way of setting things right again.

  Besides, after the success that those eight-legged buggers brought me, I thought it would be the kindest thing I could do.

  I hope you enjoy it, and thanks for coming on another journey into the darker side of things.

  How’s that chair?

  Comfy?

  Then let us begin….

  Prologue

  “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth. He created man in his own image. At some point along the way, he made spiders. What was he thinking?”

  1.

  Jenny Roberts had lost her stupid cat again. She might just be worrying about the damn thing too much, but she hadn’t had the best luck when it came to cats. This had been the fifth one that she had owned since she moved onto Corsica Road seven years ago to be with her boyfriend-now-husband Alan. For her it had been an upgrade, moving from a bedsit into a full-blown house. Not that she had ever really been poor but she was a stickler for saving her money. Any unnecessary expense was just not her bag, baby. That’s why living in that little bedsit had done her just fine. As long as she had a roof over her head, she really didn’t give a shit about the quality. That bedsit, part of a six-bedroomed house over the other side of town hadn’t actually been too bad. It had been pretty clean and well lit, not like some of the other places that she had looked at whilst she had been hunting for digs. Some of them weren’t fit to house farmyard animals, let alone a young professional such as herself. Jenny was a mobile hairdresser. But she had the best reputation in the whole county, only because she wasn’t a time waster. She was never one for making an appointment last longer than it needed to. She had just the right amount of chit-chat and leading questions to keep her customers engaged whilst she snipped, blow dried and added colour or bleaches. She worked more hours than all of the other mobile hair dressers could ever do. She had built the business up from nothing much at all. She had learned her craft at college and then set right out to make her mark. The idea of going and working for someone else just didn’t sit with her at all, she needed to go out and make it on her own. At first, she did it just for her friends and family, charging them discounted rates whilst she got her shit together and then she was off and running. The advent of social media and word-of-mouth had got her name out there and ever since she had been grafting hard and earning some good money.

  Jenny had been taught her most valuable life-lesson pretty early on by her father who had died of lung cancer when she was fifteen years of age. As a child, she had found a stray ten-pound note sitting under the bench at the local park. Her father liked to bring their dog Laddie to the playground. There were some nice big fields surrounding the play area where Laddie could go charging around in big circles, his tongue hanging out of his mouth and flapping in the wind as he ran. Stan could sit on the bench, smoke his pipe and watch Jenny play in the park for a good hour or so. He had called Jenny over ready to set off for home and she had climbed off the swing and thundered over to him. Her eyes had darted downwards under the bench where her father was sat and she had seen the note. At first, she thought that her father had dropped it and she bent down, picked it up and handed it to him.

  “Well, what have you found here?” said Stan, taking the note off her.

  “You dropped it Daddy,” said Jenny.

  Stan unfolded the note. “It’s not mine Jen, someone else must have dropped it.”

  “Oh,” said Jenny, her forehead furrowed into a frown, “Shall I put it back?”

  Stan laughed. “No, my dear, we should put it to some good use,” he said. He stood up and began to rummage around in his trouser pocket. Eventually he pulled his hand out with a crumpled five-pound note. He handed it to Jenny who took it from him, her head still wrinkled in that little frown that made her look so much like her mother.

  “That’s your half. Keep it safe Jenny. Remember that with money, it’s not how much you make, it’s how much you are willing to save,” he said.

  Jenny nodded, “Ok Daddy,” she said.

  “Now, what’s say we get this silly dog home and have ourselves a hot chocolate,” said Stan, a grin spreading across his face.

  “Yay,” said Jenny. She grabbed hold of her father’s hand and let him lead her all the way home.

  Jenny never spent the five pounds her father gave her. She took him at his word and saved it. After he died, she mounted the note onto a piece of white card and had it framed. She hung that picture in every place she lived from that day forwards as a reminder to be careful with her money.

  It was just a shame that she couldn’t be as careful with her cats. Every time she got herself a new one, be it a rescue cat or a brand-new kitten she would always end up in exactly the same position that she was in right now, standing by the open back door in her vest top and jogging bottoms and shaking a box of cat treats in an effort to get the fluffy shitbag back into the house. It was bitingly cold this evening as well, which made her impatience even more short fused. She wanted to get the little fucker inside before it got to rush hour.

  “Come on, Tigger,”

  Shake-shake-shake

  She listened for anything that might sound like a cat approaching, perhaps a bang on the wooden fence as he scaled it, a bark from next door’s dog as he bounded past their back window, but there was nothing, just the sounds of silence rolling in through the darkness towards her. She sighed, mentally kicking herself for continuing
to have faith that a cat would have any loyalty whatsoever. Granted, the last two had fallen victim to Hemmington Road which ran right past the back of the house. It was the main road through the town and it used up a lot of pets, especially on a Friday and a Saturday night when the take-aways that were dotted up and down the road put their rubbish out for the local wildlife to rummage through, including most of the neighborhood cats. The problem for them was that the road never really went quiet, even at all hours of the night. It was the primary route from central Hemmington to the M56 motorway which ensured that there were, at the very least, a high number of delivery vans and lorries roaring up and down all night. It was just a sad fact that it was far easier and much less dangerous for a driver to just mow an unsuspecting animal down if they chose to run out into the road. Cats were the number two victims on that road, only outnumbered by urban foxes.

  She had lost another three cats to straying. One in particular, a white socks cat that she had named Nibbles had gone out for his evening constitutional never to return. Two months later she had seen Nibbles happily sitting in the window of a house five doors down. The cat looked right at her as she stared at him open mouthed and if he recognized her at all then he didn’t give any indication whatsoever.

  She shook the box of biscuits one more time. Some of them jumped out of the little serving hole in the side of the box and clicked onto the flagstone porch.

  “Come on Tigger, you little fuck nuts,” she said, probably a little too loud. She craned an ear to the garden which was lit up by the security light. There was nothing but silence, and more silence, and then….

  Bang

  Jenny recoiled a little. The bang had come from the garden fence to her left-hand side. It was followed by a thud and then the unmistakable scrabbling of claws.

  “Tigger, thank Christ for that,” said Jenny and she took a step forwards to grab hold of him as he got to the top of the fence. She didn’t want him running away again. It was bed time for cats. As she got to the fence, Tigger’s front paws appeared over the top. Jenny stopped dead in her tracks, her hand going up to her mouth. Then the cat pulled himself up to the top of the fence and she staggered backwards and screamed her husband’s name as hard as her lungs would allow her to.

  Alan Roberts had entrenched himself into the sofa, ready to watch the football and he was pulling his first can off his six-pack of beers when Jenny had screamed. The act of her screaming was a shock in itself, it wasn’t something that he was used to hearing from her. In Alan’s mind, Jenny was a pretty tough nut. She wasn’t one to be easily spooked by a horror film or a bug in the bathroom sink, nor was she one of those people that would take any shit from anyone. She was never rude, but she was assertive and bloody minded when it came to getting what she wanted, and it didn’t matter what it was, a return on an item of clothing she had bought but found fault with, or haggling the best price she could get for anything expensive that they had bought. She had managed to get a seventy-pound discount off the forty-two-inch television that was sat in their front room right now just by haggling with the young shop assistant. She had managed to get the assistant manager and then the manager involved and ran them around in circles until she got what she wanted. He hadn’t interjected himself in the haggle at any time. He had just stood back and watched her serve the shop workers their arses, and then they left with the television they wanted and the price that she wanted. It really was a thing of beauty to watch. Their marriage worked better than a well-oiled machine. They both knew exactly what they wanted and needed from each other, there was no bullshit, there was very little needed in the way of compromise. Since the day that they first met they had fitted together like a foot in an old leather shoe. He knew that she would be working her tail off to keep her business going so he made sure that she didn’t have to worry about the trivial shit such as food shopping or paying bills. He took care of all of that in between his shifts at the card factory running the folding presses. She would leave him to his football and wouldn’t bug him about how many beers he would drink or how loudly he would bellow at the television. He could have even brought friends around to watch the game with him if he wanted to, but he didn’t like to make chit-chat or be distracted in any way when the game was on. Tonight was a little different to the norm. Tonight she had shrieked his name in such a way that he knew something was terribly wrong. He was out of his seat before the scream had even come to an end. He ran straight through into the kitchen and he saw Jenny backing up through the back door, her hands clapped to her cheeks. Her head was shaking from side to side and she was making a low moaning noise in the back of her throat.

  “Jenny? What the fu….” The words died on his tongue.

  Their pet cat Tigger was weaving and wobbling on top of the garden fence. Every few seconds he was letting out a gravelly, guttural wail that sounded nothing like the healthy and happy sound of a cat. Tigger’s ginger and white fur, or what was left of it was matted in wild patches. Every visible piece of skin was covered in angry blisters. Some of them had broken open allowing a white, milky fluid to ooze out and cake the pieces of remaining fuzz. The worst affected area was Tigger’s face. The left side of it looked unharmed, but the right side wasn’t even recognizable anymore. The right eye looked like it had been blown right out of the cat’s skull. The shredded pieces of it were plastered to his swollen and savaged cheek. The lower right jaw was hanging down as if it had been torn out of place. Tigger’s tongue poked through the mess of flesh and exposed bone.

  “Oh….oh…….oh…” was all Alan could come out with. He had never seen such a vision of horror in his life. He didn’t know how the animal could possibly have still been alive in such a state. As he looked on, Tigger swayed back and forth on the fence and then he pitched forwards. He fell to the concrete floor with a nauseating wet slap. As his body struck the flags most of the sores on his back broke open sending an arc of milky and bloody fluid spraying up the fence and across the porch. He lay on the floor shaking and growling and looking to Jenny and Alan with his one good eye for help that they couldn’t give him. Jenny turned and tried to get away, but the strength went out of her legs and she went to her knees in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  “God, dear sweet God, oh Christ Alan, what happened to him?” she wailed.

  Alan opened his mouth to answer and then he brought up the mash potatoes, onion gravy and sausages that he had spent an hour cooking earlier that evening. The grotesque concoction roared out of his mouth and coated his bare feet and a decent area of the floor beneath him.

  As Alan was dry retching and Jenny was biting the back of her hand to stop herself from fainting, Tigger breathed his last shaking breath right there on the porch. After what he had been subjected to in the last few hours, he felt nothing but the faintest hint of relief when the end finally came.

  2.

  The jerking reaction to the nightmare had caused Briggs to sit bolt upright on his bunk. The light from the overhead spots hurt his eyes, even though they were constantly on low. His body was slick with sweat, pinning his vest top to his body in a slimy coating. His chest heaved, tearing a breath into his lungs. He sat there for a moment, panting, feeling the terrible vision that he had just been subjected to beginning to fade away, at least for now. It wasn’t the first time he had been thrown from his sleep by that nightmare. He had lost count of the amount of times he had replayed that moment over and over again. He looked around his room. The same room he had as his own for so long now. How long had it been? Three years? Four years? The fog of his chemically induced sleep was still coating his mind.

  The small blind on his window suddenly clicked open. There was a pair of deep blue eyes looking in at him. It was one of the nurses. Her name was momentarily lost in the swirling mist of his mind right now. It would come back to him.

  Blue eyes looked in at him for around five seconds and then the blind clicked back up again, shutting out some of the light from the corridor. They checked up on him every two hours
or so, just to make sure he wasn’t trying to take his own life. They called it ‘Protecting you from yourself Mike. I can call you Mike, can’t I?’

  He didn’t want to be called Mike, but they called him Mike anyway. That wasn’t the only thing they had called him.

  They had called him insane.

  They had called him a terrorist.

  They had called him a murderer.

  Of course, they had wanted to pin the blame for Newtown on him, it was a nice, tidy way to put the whole thing to bed. He was pretty sure that he had been tried and sentenced by the media and the powers that be without him having to lift a finger. But, he would be damned if he was going to make it easy for them. He knew what the truth of the matter was. It was only a matter of time before it would all come back to haunt them, then they would change their tune, then they would see that there was nothing he, or they, could have done to stop what happened in Newtown.

  So, they had sent him here, inside the walls of this hospital.

  They had called him insane.

  He swung his legs off bed and placed his bare feet on the cold wooden floor. He looked around the sterile room that had been his home for such a long time now. He had an idea that it was around five years since he had first been brought here and sedated day after day. He had fought them at first, thrashing his body around, trying to stop the needle being buried in his buttock, but they always won. He would feel the sting on his skin and then a few moments later his strength would float away…

  Five years? Has it really been that long?

  It was easy to lose track. Every day was exactly the same. The routine never changed. Some of the others couldn’t cope if the routine altered, the others that came and went. Some of them fought, some of them screamed, and in the end, all of them fell into the silence, shuffling around the corridors, a glazed look in their eye. The right hit of medications at the right time of day kept them quiet, kept them under control. Some of them stayed a while, some of them vanished without a trace, but they all fell to the silence. All of them.